The open source DOCX editor submitted to HN a few weeks ago has been deleted

A shiny open-source tool for editing Word documents in the browser has suddenly gone poof: the GitHub pages are gone, the main site is throwing a 503 error (basically: “this site is unavailable”), and Hacker News commenters have turned into a mix of private investigators, armchair lawyers, and chaos gremlins. The original post was already spicy because the author said they couldn’t even include the links—apparently Hacker News filters dead ones—so the whole thing instantly got that delicious “forbidden evidence” energy.

From there, the crowd split into camps. Some went straight to conspiracy-lite mode, with one commenter saying it was “forseeable that MS would be very interested in taking a security stance,” hinting that Microsoft might not love a browser tool poking around its beloved .docx file format. Others were less dramatic and more practical, digging up backup copies and mirrors like internet preppers preserving civilization. One helpful user pointed out that the source code still appears to live on elsewhere under an open license, while another dropped a mirrored repo like a digital rescue flare.

Then came the classic Hacker News sniping. One person lamented that their team had already been “hammering on it” in testing because it solved a real problem, only to be met with the skeptical “what makes this one so special?” crowd and the inevitable “What is wrong with LibreOffice?” detour. The funniest energy came from the moderation drama: a commenter side-eyed the deleted project’s brand-new account and basically scolded it for bad Hacker News etiquette. In other words, this wasn’t just a disappearing app story—it became a full-on comment-section soap opera about trust, self-promotion, backup mirrors, and whether the internet ever really lets a useful tool die.